CMX Lunch Seminar

Elastic instabilities are ubiquitous in natural and engineered systems across a wide range of scales—from supercoiled DNA and folded tissues to flower petals and deployable space structures. While great progress has been made over the past two centuries in predicting the equilibrium shapes of stressed materials, the dynamics of buckling and wrinkling remain rich with theoretical and computational challenges.

In this talk, I will present our recent theoretical and experimental efforts to understand how elastic patterns evolve when driven far from equilibrium by mechanical and hydrodynamic instabilities. In the first part, I will discuss the evolution of wrinkle patterns of confined elastic membranes floating on fluid surfaces, showing how confinement slows down pattern selection and leads to departures from the self-similar behaviors familiar in fluid mechanics. In the second part, I will demonstrate how rapid quenching can trigger the emergence of nontrivial buckling modes, and how tuning external control parameters enables the targeted selection of specific patterns. This phenomenon—reminiscent of the Kibble–Zurek mechanism in continuous non-equilibrium phase transitions—opens new avenues for the dynamical design of elastic patterns.